When natural disasters strike, such as hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, and fires, emergency first responders need rapid and timely access to space-based and aerial imagery to aid in mitigation planning, allocation of resources, search and rescue, and recovery efforts. Having delayed access to space-based products creates a sub-optimal situational awareness environment. In fact, access to near “real-time” information with timely updates can make the difference between life and death.
However, delivering large imagery files to the field has taken too long, required delivery by manually transporting external media to the field, or required increasing communications bandwidth, which is costly. Responders have been left trying to make plans using outdated imagery information. Thus, a need exists to improve the dissemination of large imagery files to first responders in the field.